Introduction: Runaway Topographies

A number of the natives gathered round me, and said they wanted to talk. Two of the best Malay scholars helped each other, the rest putting in hints and ideas in their own language. They told me a long rambling story; but, partly owing to their imperfect knowledge of Malay, partly through my ignorance of the local terms, and partly through the incoherence of their narrative, I could not make it out very clearly. It was, however, a tradition, and I was glad to find they had anything of the kind. A long time ago, they said, some strangers came to Aru, and came here to Wanumbai, and the chief of the Wanumbai people did not like them, and wanted them to go away, but they would not go, and so it came to fighting, and many Aru men were killed, and some, along with the chief, were taken prisoners, and carried away by the strangers. Some of the speakers, however, said that he was not carried away, but went away in his own boat to escape from the foreigners, and went to the sea and never came back again. But they all believe that the chief and the people that went with him still live in some foreign country; and if they could but find out where, they would send for them to come back again.... They had sought for them everywhere, they said—on the land and in the sea, in the forest and on the mountains, in the air and in the sky, and could not find them; therefore, they must be in my country, and they begged me to tell them, for I must surely know, as I came from across the great sea.... And then they told me that a good many years ago, when the speakers were boys, some Wokan men who were out fishing met these lost people in the sea, and spoke to them; and the chief gave the Wokan men a hundred fathoms of cloth to bring to the men of Wanumbai, to show that they were alive and would soon come back to them; but the Wokan men were thieves, and kept the cloth, and they only heard of it afterwards; and when they spoke about it, the Wokan men denied it, and pretended they had not received the cloth;—so they were quite sure their friends were at that time alive and somewhere in the sea. And again, not many years ago, a report came to them that some Bugis traders had brought some children of their lost people; so that they went to Dobbo [sic] to see about it, and the owner of the house, who was now speaking to me, was one who went; but the Bugis man would not let them see the children, and threatened to kill them if they came into his house. He kept the children shut up in a large box, and when he went away he took them with him. And at the end of each of these stories, they begged me in an imploring tone to tell them if I knew where their chief and their people now were. (Wallace 1962 [1869], 357–59)

When I reread Wallace recently I was arrested and unsettled by this passage, which I had overlooked during my earlier forays into the existing literature on the Aru Islands—what Michel de Certeau calls a "library navigation" (de Certeau 1986). Here was Alfred Russel Wallace, the great English naturalist and author of The Malay Archipelago: The Land of the Orang-Utan and the Bird of Paradise, on the evening of April 28, 1857, having a "grand consultation" with some natives of the Aru settlement of Wanumbai. Here at the far end of a small tributary that branches southward off of the Watulai "river" to burrow itself deep into the forested interior of Maikor Island, Wallace would suffer greatly from ulcers on his feet caused by pernicious insect bites. Here, too, he would obtain several specimens of the fully plumed Legless Bird of Paradise (Paradisea apoda), thus fulfilling one of the main objectives of his visit to these islands (see Quammen 1996, 88–96; Swadling 1996, 127). Although unremarked in later biographies, in Wanumbai Wallace was also the select audience for this remarkable story that, he writes, had evidently been plotted beforehand by the inhabitants of this modest settlement of hunters and small-scale horticulturalists (Wallace 1962 [1869], 357).

Uncannily, this story resonates across a span of more than one hundred years with tales told to me by Barakai islanders of some long lost kin across the sea and of their ongoing and repeatedly thwarted attempts to send to their Backshore relations boxes of clothes. Let me be clear from the start. I am not interested in documenting the resilience across time of what Wallace positively embraces and normalizes as "tradition." Nor is my aim the historicist one of extracting the truthful kernel of a locatable happening from within the shell of the tale. To be sure, as Wallace speculates, there may be a historical memory at work in the story told to him as in the one I heard a good century later. It is, for instance, not unimaginable that such stories might have first taken shape in the wake of the seizure of Aruese to work as slaves on the nutmeg plantations of the neighboring Banda Islands in the latter half of the seventeenth century. Or they may betray Aruese knowledge or, less likely, experience, of how Europeans occasionally took with them a handful of natives for exhibition back home (at one point when Wallace realizes that the endless stream of visitors to his hut had come especially to look at him, he reflects on how just a few years before he had been "one of the gazers at the Zulus and the Aztecs in London" [ibid., 349]). Seen in this light, the Aruese anxiety about their lost ancestors might be regarded as a local gloss on a civilizing story that draws out its underside of native expropriation and loss. As Benjamin observed, "There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism" (1969, 256).

Notwithstanding the differences separating Wallace's "grand consultation" and the stories of misplaced kin told to me, the uncanniness that comes from their juxtaposition should be neither dismissed nor shied away from. I am intrigued by the persistence in Aru of what appear as related tellings. Rather than being some complacent continuity, I argue that their repetition speaks to a chronic and fraught structure of expectancy on the part of Backshore Aruese vis-à-vis a highly elusive elsewhere. Token today of a particular politics of difference characteristic of modernity, this elsewhere emerges out of the cultural and commercial entanglements that must form the starting point of any discussion of Aru. The particular dynamics of these entanglements in the archipelago have, I believe, only intensified a common effect of colonialism—the perception that the world in certain crucial respects resides in another place, more often than not across the sea. Problematically, it is the sense of a haunting by a desired and elusive elsewhere to which one is connected that conjoins the imploring tone with which Wanumbai men beseeched Wallace for the whereabouts of their kin to the adamant insistences voiced to me that Bemunese relations must still be there,...